mouse interaction

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A Talks at Google visit by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. He presents his lifelong aim of augmenting collective human intelligence, followed by a Q&A.

The full recording of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, which introduced the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing, and real-time collaborative editing. It runs about 100 minutes.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

An over-the-shoulder view of StarCraft 2 pro player Sound at a WCS qualifier, showing his monitor, keyboard and mouse. It shows his very fast actions per minute in real time.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

A Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

Highlights from Doug Engelbart's December 1968 demonstration at SRI, the first public showing of the mouse, hypertext, windows, real-time collaborative editing and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a roughly six-minute condensed version of the full demo.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Matthaeus Krenn presents a concept for car touchscreen UI where the screen controls only one thing at a time, designed to suit driving. A tablet prototype accompanies the short demo.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

A JRE clip in which Bret Weinstein explains his concern that most American lab mice descend from a single lab lineage. He argues this undermines how well mouse research translates to humans.

The first video in Photon of Scoopex's Amiga hardware programming series. It shows how to set up an assembler and write a minimal 68000 program that waits for a left mouse click.

A mashup that plays a Miles Davis improvisation video alongside an LCD Soundsystem clip with no editing, so the two seem to perform together. It also became known for an affectionate mouse cursor moving along.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

A short screen recording of the flight simulator Easter egg hidden in Excel 97, with the steps to trigger it. The uploader notes the mouse controls are hard to handle.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

Louis Rossmann explains why he stopped using GrapheneOS, describing his interactions with its lead developer Daniel Micay. It includes chat logs shown in the video.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day examines how bad actors and bots use Twitter, drawing on the released Russian IRA dataset and interviews. It asks why interactions on the platform turn hostile.

DIY Perks shows how to modify devices that use older USB connectors so they charge and connect over USB Type-C. He solders in a USB-C connector board and works through cases such as dongle-dependent gadgets and a mouse receiver.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

Dr. John Campbell reviews a mouse study on accidental intravenous injection of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and its potential to cause myopericarditis. He walks through the methods and findings and discusses the aspiration technique.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.

A one-minute clip from The Matrix in which the crew eat a bland nutrient slurry for breakfast and Mouse muses about Tasty Wheat.

A 2017 GDC session in which Nintendo's Breath of the Wild team walks through how the game's convention-breaking systems were built. It covers the 'chemistry engine' of material interactions and shows the early 2D prototype footage.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

Not Just Bikes explains Dutch bicycle-only roads, which let people travel long distances in and out of cities with almost no car interaction. It shows how this changes cycling from a chore into something enjoyable.